Monday, 3 June 2013

The level is now finished. I say "finished", but really what I mean is: I'm handing it in.

Did i finish the level? Well examining my brief, I did meet all of the basic requirements, more or less. Regrettably, so much got rushed towards the end. I'd say my goals were ambitious, and due to external factors I spent about 70% of the time I thought I'd be able to on it, so it's not too surprising the level of polish is not quite as hoped.

Let's examine the successes and failures of the project.

Day/Night and Lighting
Success! I'm pretty happy with the result here. After much wrestling with the cascading shadow maps, I feel I've got pretty solid shadows. Regrettably, the global illumination approximations are extremely ghetto, relying on custom lighting, tweaked via matinee across a whole range of "ambient light" parameters (one for each material), with no occlusion approximations, except those painted by hand in the cave and a couple of other spots.

Certainly, this is an area which would have hugely benefitted both in production time and final result, by using a more modern game engine with GI approximation (CryEngine and Unreal Engine 4 would have been excellent in this regard).

Weather
Moderate failure. Although I do have rain particles and snow particles and the clouds and lighting and snow accumulation to support them, there were so many features of the weather that were not completed. Also, I wasn't able to drive the weather through parametric randomness, instead relying on the easy-to-implement fixed-matinee sequence. This means the weather is entirely predictable and consistent year-on-year, rather than being random.

The rain does not feature puddles, splashes, ripples, wetness or speculars on surfaces as hoped. There simply wasn't time. I also really wanted to have lit-rain surrounding the torches, which I didn't get time for. The rain effect itself is nothing special, either, and would have been nice to create driving rain, and a greater sense of wind affecting the rain. Also, the lightning doesn't illuminate the sky, which would have been a really great effect.

I'm very pleased with the accumulation and melt of snow, which accumulates evenly and melts in well-lit and well-walked areas first. The snow particles themselves are pretty generic, and I went with the easiest snowfall to do: the gentle drifting snow. It might have been nice to get a real blizzard going.

The fog is also super-simple. It would have been nice to do a bit more fantastical mist drifting about, and also slightly stylized fog, and had more effective sunlight through the fog.

Seasons
Success! I'm happy enough with the seasons, though I noticed pretty late on that the snow sticks around far too late into spring, but the leaf colour changes, fall and regrowth work really well. The grass size changing is actually pretty unnoticeable, although in the snow it does look like the snow is covering the shortest grass, which is a nice little effect.

Looking back at my reference, I don't feel I exaggerated the seasons as much as perhaps I should have. It would have been nice to do blossom, and I also didn't get time to do the leaves accumulating on the ground and drifting down-river, which would have really completed the autumnal feel, but generally, the seasons are working pretty well.

Foliage
Moderate success. I think in the end, the trees turned out okay. They're horrifically expensive right now (I'm in the process of optimising them for the degree show, but this won't make the hand-in date)... but they look pretty good. I'm happy with the way the leaves move gently in the breeze, though I wasn't able to get a convincing gale-force wind.

The grass worked out alright in the end too, though it looks a bit well-kept. It could really have benefitted from other small plants like dandelions and daisies. The same is true for a medium-sized plant - this would really have helped bridge the horticultural gap between the small grass and the large trees. I ended up using scaled-down branches clipping through the ground... which is a bit cheap and naff really.

Rocks
Success! The rocks were probably the biggest soul-drainer, meeting artistic problems at every step. However, in the end (and with a lot of lost time), they worked out pretty well, I think.

The moss and snow both work very nicely with the rocks (though at time the snow does appear to be a different brightness on rocks than on the ground, but its a pretty minor thing).

The overall style of the rocks seems realistic and is fairly readbale and undistracting. There are a few cases that the rocks are a bit blobby and/or a bit uniform in their scale and arrangement, but this would be easily rectified with a bit better placement.

The distant rocks aren't so strong. Scaling them up to be massive looks a bit cheap and really I should have spent more time creating another, very large rock asset, and worked the terrain into the rocks in the distance much better.

Architecture
Moderate success. The architecture was very rushed, leaving in placeholder assets that I didn't have time to create properly. I also wanted to include tesselation to bring the silhouette of the stone blocks to life, but directx 11 (required for tesselation) hurt my frame rate too much before I even introduced the tesselation, so I had to abandon this hope.

I was very pleased with the way the torches illuminated the architecture, and worked well with the baked-normals of the stone wall. Also the copper roofs, which were something of a gamble which looked to be a mistake for a long time, actually turned out pretty well once I'd done the vertex painting to get the balance between oxidised and clean copper.

Misc Effects
Success! The river turned out great, with believable reflections and the illusion of depth with fresnel and the ebbing froth as the water travelled down. Although I didn't get to do the flow map, which would have enhanced the water further, I think I got away without it, and generally it isn't noticeable that the water sometimes flows from or into a hard surface.

The waterfalls also came out well, despite not being as strong as I was originally planning (though this better matches the throughput of the river). The large waterfalls in the vista could have used their own shader and textures, but I didn't really get time for them, so they ended up looking a bit rushed (along with most stuff in the vista really).

The torches didn't use a flipbook as I'd have liked, but I think I got away with it. The licks of flame work particularly well, though the stacking one-on-top-another looks very "computer game" and not realistic. I would have really liked a glow effect around them, and also lit rain when it's raining, but (for probably the hundredth time in this post) I ran out of time.

Sky
Failure. The biggest failure of the project was undoubtedly the sky. What's there doesn't look bad, but I didn't set out to make a project that "isn't bad", so my disappointment only really makes sense in the context of my hopes for the sky.

Hope: Thunderous stormclouds, crowning over the horizon, bringing with them a deluge of rain and hurricane wind.

Achieved: The entire sky fades linearly to overcast all at once, rain piddles down. the wind speed is unaffected.

Achieved: Dotty-looking clouds, seemingly evenly lit and white at all times, irrespective of the light direction or colour.

Hope: Moonlight dancing between the clouds; a striking visual landmark in the night sky.

Achieved: I don't even have a moon. And the sun always draws in front of the clouds.

...you get the idea. The saving grace really, what I have is only bad in the context of my ambitions, it's little worse than most skies we see in games.

Final Thoughts
I'm really pleased with my choice for a final major project. It gave me heaps to do and challenges at every step. I regret I don't have any individually nice assets (plans for the statue by the waterfall were abandoned early on), but as a complete piece I'm pretty happy with the result. For a long time I was seriously worried that what I would finish with would actually be something of an embarrassment, but I'm delighted to say that I'm vaguely proud of it. ish.

I'll probably do it all over again when a free Unreal Engine 4 developer kit is out. And I'll probably spend a year doing it. Then I'll have scratched my itch and finally be able to say: THIS is what I want a dynamic fantasy environment to look like!

Please take a look at the flythrough video, showcasing the full environment and... most... of the season/weather/time of day combinations. :)

Saturday, 1 June 2013

I had been putting off the sky because I really had no idea how long I would have available to work on it. It actually was at the point where I thought I would have to settle for entirely cloudless sky, but I really couldn't stand just relying on fog when it rained, So I had a quick go to see what I could do in a couple of days.

I started by doing "dotty" clouds. I knew these wouldn't need clever lighting to look believable, and I had a few pictures which I could use for this purpose.

By using two different sets of UV coordinates, I was able to use top-down style mapping for overhead clouds, as well as ring-style cylindrical mapping for horizon clouds. One of the channels was used to break up the obviousness of the repetition by tiling at a different amount. Combined with the existing fog, the result was pretty satisfying and much nicer than just a plain sky, albeit nothing fancy:

For the overcast texture, I slapped and stitched together many different stormy and overcast cloud pictures. The fade in for this is simply linear, which is not very realistic, but I was in a bit of a rush at this point, so it had to do. I generated a normal map, which is mostly ineffective, but again... it had to do.

I would have loved the lightning to light up the sky, and I had the normal map to do that, but UDK wasn't immediately playing ball and I didn't any longer have the time to wrestle with it, so i just rolled over and let UDK win that round.

At night, the clouds are very hard to make out (which is about right), and they block the stars (also, about right). I would have really loved to add a moon which lit up the clouds, but given my failure with getting the sun to light up the sky, I didn't even try for the moon.

I set up a light function to give the appearance of the sun casting the shadows of clouds on the ground. The effect is very subtle (perhaps unnoticable? :S) but hopefully it gives that can't-put-a-finger-on-it extra dynamic "alive" feel to the lighting. This actually introduced an unexpected problem - because I had now started using the sun to light up the clouds, I was now casting the shadow of overhead clouds onto the clouds, which of course was nonsense. This actually meant I ended up duplicating the sun light without the cloud-shadow function and using that to light the sky instead.